You want engineering quality experts, but not clear at all that needs to be at CEO level. If you have someone with that skill and great experience running large and complex organisations - great take them. If not, take someone who knows how to get organisations to change and do stuff.
There is plenty of evidence that engineers in the CEO seat are effective drivers of companies and shareholder value. This is false equivalence reasoning presented over and over in this thread and I dare say this opinion is quite antiquated and precisely the thinking that has put Boeing on its current destructive course.
Not really. My arguments have been pretty consistent that being an engineer and being a good CEO are not really linked. Some engineers are good CEO, so are some MBAs, physcians, ...
Not clear at all that the best CEO is an MBA either. Putting an MBA in charge of engineering processes is like arguing anyone can do it, so if that's the position then why the resistance towards it being an engineer? If you want a culture expert, how about a history prof or an anthropologist? "Experience running large organizations" usually just equates to failing upwards.. run the last few orgs you admin into the ground and hide the debris with outsourcing, mergers, acquisitions, anything that hides your responsibility long enough to dodge accountability, move on to the next before it gets pinned on you. Do that 10 or 15 times, and that's a great career for most of the leadership/culture "experts" in the CEO world. I don't get the apologism or tendency to lionize these people